Is art a living or a hobby? The debate began over on the Culture Future blog, where Guy Yedwab has been considering how difficult it is to earn a living as an artist. "When people observe that teachers have a lot of trouble making ends meet, it's a social justice problem," he points out. "We don't consider 'teaching' a hobby, largely because it's universally accepted that teaching is a requirement for society ... On the other hand, if we were to find out that futures traders have trouble making ends meet it would not be a social justice problem. They would just go do something else, and we'd probably be thrilled."

This leads him to ask: "Is art a living that people should be able to support themselves on – and thus, the poverty that attends to it is a social justice problem – or is art a luxury and the people who work on it hobbyists?" It's a good question and one that is particularly acute in theatrical terms. After all, theatre is a much harder thing to commodify than many other art forms because its value derives from its liveness, and cannot be reproduced and sold ad infinitum. Therefore the capacity for turning a profit and sustaining a living is even more limited. As the Flux Theatre Ensemble blog points out, monetary worth is never a good way of judging the true value of theatre.

The Chicago-based blogger Don Hall, has a very simple answer to this dilemma. He says, rather loudly: "YOU AREN'T GOING TO MAKE A LIVING AS AN ARTIST IN THEATRE. You can make a living as an artist in commercial voiceover, on camera industrials and commercials, in film or as a teacher, but the only people at 95% of the theatres in Chicago making a living in the theatre are administrative people – not the artists." So in order to make good work, you have to resign yourself to the fact that doing it ain't going to feed you.

Yet perhaps there's an upside to all of this. Blogger and playwright RVC Bard says she is leaning towards Don Hall's position: "And it's not because of little things like reality, probability and so on. It's because not making a living off theatre makes my work better – because real people live in the real world and, as a theatre artist, that's where my focus needs to be. Even if I do something completely surreal and fantastical, the core will be about life as it is lived today. I can't get that if I'm a sort of secular monk who can't be bothered with the lives and concerns of laypeople."

Now it is true, as Guy Yedwab points out in a follow-up post, that maintaining two jobs can cut both ways: just as it can put you in greater touch with the "real world", it can also leave you with very little time to focus on that world. But either way, Bard is surely right to point out the importance of not disappearing completely into the tiny bubble of theatreland.

Anyway, as the global economy continues to falter, the idea of job security in many fields is looking increasingly unlikely. Adam Thurman at Mission Paradox writes: "We are all going to have to work harder then ever to carve a career path for ourselves. So you might as well do what you love." Now this doesn't mean, he says, that you should "get all stupid on me and quit your day job to devote your time to sculpting or writing the next great novel. It's hard to do great art and dodge eviction notices at the same time. But you might as well try to see if you can integrate your art into your life. Maybe it gets to the point where you make a living from it, maybe not."

And perhaps that is the key point: it is perfectly possible to pursue one's creative ambitions in tandem with a bit of mundane wage-slavery. After all, Einstein did some of his best stuff while he was working as a patent clerk.